Old links are valued higher than new links with the view to filtering out those sites that are promoted through rapid link buying.

A method for ranking a linked document, comprising: determining an age of linkage data associated with the linked document; and ranking the linked document based on a decaying function of the age of the linkage data.

55. The method of claim 54, wherein the linkage data includes at least one link.

56. The method of claim 54, wherein the linkage data includes anchor text.

57. The method of claim 54, wherein the linkage data includes a rank based, at least in part, on links and anchor text provided by one or more linking documents and related to the linked document.

58. The method of claim 57, further comprising: determining longevity of the linkage data; deriving an indication of content update for a linking document providing the linkage data; and adjusting the ranking of the linked document based on the longevity of the linkage data and the indication of content update for the linking document.

Also:

The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to behavior of links over time; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining behavior of links associated with the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the behavior of links associated with the document.

For reference, this is claim 1:

A method for scoring a document, comprising: identifying a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data.

Personal experience

I can personally vouch that longer standing links are more powerful, although this may be in conjunction with older sites (see my blog entry about older pages ranking better than new pages).

As a web site owner you should be sure that you don’t link to any of these sandboxed sites.  Analyse the content of all sites that you are linking to – be sure that you aren’t linking to high risk sites such as link farms and free for alls.

If you are linking to a sandboxed site, your site is likely to also be put in the sandbox.  It is worth checking the links periodically as some web sites change from time to time; the most obvious example being the real estate to adult material switch made by some webmasters over the past few years.

It is worth mentioning that you aren’t punished for backlinks from these sandboxed sites because you don’t have any control over who links to you.

Useful Resource:Google’s Patent Implications

The patent also considers the age of any given page vs. the age of other pages on this site; newer pages on an older site will get faster recognition than newer pages on a new site.

New websites / pages are not expected to have a large number of links immediately presumably to stop the SEO techniques that are commonly used to get new sites ranked highly:

Search engine 125 may use the inception date of a document for scoring of the document. For example, it may be assumed that a document with a fairly recent inception date will not have a significant number of links from other documents (i.e., back links). For existing link-based scoring techniques that score based on the number of links to/from a document, this recent document may be scored lower than an older document that has a larger number of links (e.g., back links). When the inception date of the documents are considered, however, the scores of the documents may be modified (either positively or negatively) based on the documents’ inception dates.

Reports suggest that Google may not rank a new web site highly for the first 8 months from its inception date. It is called the age delay.

There are a couple of solutions (extracted from Vaughn’s papers):

One method is to join the Google Ad Words or Adsense program, in which case your pages get spidered in MINUTES. Your site will be checked initially with an algo or human “smell test”. If you smell good, you’re in. Good rankings will follow (provided of course, that you have good on-page SEO, and a few good backlinks). If you are a Google partner (“approved”), then you are not going to be penalized, unless you subsequently “go bad”.

The second method is to buy an old domain, just for it’s longevity, and old backlinks. Many have bought up old domain names for this purpose. This may work right now, but the rules will soon change again. They always do.

Interested in user comments about this.

It appears that pages from forum or community based discussion boards are ranked using an algorithm different to other pages:

Some geospatial entities originate in public forums (such as the Google Earth Community) and in this context there is an identified creation date for each entity. When two or more entities are similar in location they likely describe related information. To establish a further refined ranking score for such cases, an embodiment of the ranking system described herein gives a rank bonus to the older post as an encouragement for users to create entities defining new information rather than revisiting previously described locations.

The Google Patent also describes how fresh pages are ranked higher to encourage fresh and new content.  It is assumed that this rank is applied to the majority of pages (those that aren’t that of a bulletin board format).

In another embodiment, newer data receives a higher rank because it reflects fresher and more current information.

It is certainly recommended to keep updating your web site as often as you have decent content to update it with; webmasters report that web sites can slip quite drastically when not updated frequently, some have reported drops of up to 100 places for competitive listings.

Pay particular attention to the number of hyphens used in your domain.  A small number is fine; Stick to two or less. Using more may endanger your site; domains with numerous hyphens look spammy; Reports that Google checks this.

.gov sites seem to be given very high status (reputable source, governmental agencies and web sites are reputable and information contained within is of high importance)
.edu sites and .org sites also both seem to be given a high status.

I have also personally had very good experience with .info – they seem to rank highly.
Google seems to scrutinize the .com population most which is logical seeing as a lot of the “make a dollar fast” sites fall under this TLD.

Quite a controversial point with many differing voices of opinion. I have had sites up to 80-90kb ranking on the top page of Google. The cache limit for Google is 100kb and so I recommend keeping below this
threshold. A fellow SEO enthusiast performed a study to determine whether correlation between page size and rank exists. The results showed that pages within the 60kb to 70kb range ranked highest. Page size study.

Keep below 100kb, don’t worry about achieving an optimal size, though, because I argue that the results of the above study are purely coincidental.

Hyphens in domain

I have occasionally heard of instances where pages are penalised due to having an excessive amount of hypens in the URL. This sounds plausible as an attempt by Google to filter out spam sites. 4 or less is fine.

Update Frequency

Fresh pages (those have been modified recently) and pages that are updated on a regular basis rank high on
Google’s “FreshRank” patented algorithm.

Valid links
Ensure you have no dead links in your site – Google will track these as http errors (if you sign up for a Google account you can see a list of the http errors that Google has encountered whilst crawling your site). Http errors will negatively affect your position – in one instance http errors due to server outage temporarily cost me 15 places. You can check the validity of your links at Dead-links.com.

Statically generated links
Ideally you should have static links as opposed to passing variables through the URL. A standard HTML page is static, are some .php and .asp pages, however any URL’s that contain a ? are dynamically generated and should be avoided as much as possible. Read more about this and how you can still have dynamically generated content whilst being Google friendly.

Two levels
Ideally you should be able to reach any page on your site through two levels of links. This is important for regular crawling of lower level pages.

Avoid Link Churning
Link churning is described by Google as:

Link churning is computed as a function of an extent to which one or more links provided by the document changes over time.

Google has patented a link churn algorithm that is designed to punish sites that change the target of their external hyperlinks too frequently. The Google “link churn” patent. Webmasters should therefore pay consideration to who they link to and how often their links change. The level of the “link churning” threshold, or even a ballpark range, has not been published.

Number of hyperlinks per page
Google mentions its Webmaster Guidelines to keep the number of links on a given page to a “reasonable number (fewer than 100)”. Pages with more links are accepted into the rankings, although I don’t believe it be worthwhile or indeed user-friendly to crowd the page with hyperlinks.

Keyword prominence
More weight placed on keywords that are prominent on the page, ie. keywords that are encapsulated between <H1> tags are considered better than keywords in regular text. The same is true for <b> and other font decorations. Similarly keywords that are located at the top of the page are given more weight than those hidden away in the footer, for example.

This quote has been extracted from Google’s Tech page:

Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.

Ordering of Keywords
Check to make sure that your keywords are in the order that you expect them to be queryed.

Keywords in Alt text
You can and should use keywords when giving an alt description of an image – make sure they are relevant though.

The <title> tag
It is very important to include Keywords in the <title> tag as Google reportedly places a lot of emphasis on this. Furthermore, the <META> tag of type “description” is checked; the constraint being that it must be less than 200 characters in length. It is also worth noting that the description is what appears on the search engine results page.

Keyword <META> tag
It has been reported that Google no longer uses the keyword <META>. However other search engines still do and whilst it may not help you achieve a high ranking in Google, it is certainly a worthwhile inclusion.